No funny title here Okay, Israelis, Palestinians, European antisemitism, etc etc. A couple of long but worthwhile letters of comment. First, from David Moles:

For what it’s worth, I think the—I won’t call it the resurgence, because I think it’s been there all along—the return to respectability, let’s say, of anti-Semitism in Europe over the last few weeks is scary and evil. I wouldn’t dream of blaming it on anybody other than the thugs perpetrating it and the self-satisfied fellow travelers who turn a blind eye. I wish I’d kept in touch with the French Jews I met at Oxford so that I could at least drop them a line to find out if they’re okay and let them know that someone over here cares. And I hope that it doesn’t get, here, to the level of masked gangsters assaulting soccer-playing children, and that if it does, I have the courage to do something about it.

And the Palestinian suicide bombings make me hope that there is a hell, and that there’s a special place in it for the people who send teenagers out to kill and die, and the people that sell them the explosives, and the people who design and assemble the explosive belts, and particularly the people who make toy explosive belts for kids. And maybe even for the suicide bombers themselves—I’m having trouble coming around to that one, but I’m working on it.

But when it comes around to what Ariel Sharon’s doing, when it comes to things like the Amos Oz quote in the Rosenbaum article, about “a war for our right to live, a war we will win”, I keep coming back to this scene in Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!: some of the characters are sitting around trying to figure out what to do now that a fire-breathing dragon has just been crowned King of Ankh-Morpork, and one of them says something like: “If I understand it correctly, what the dragon does, basically, is fly around setting fire to things. I’m not sure that anything I’ve heard proposed would actually put a stop to this.”

Ever since the Sharon/Barak election, I’ve heard a lot of rhetoric—broadly accurate rhetoric, I admit—about the continued terrorist attacks on Israel, and how they need to be stopped, and how Israel has a right to do what it takes to stop them.

But I’m not sure that anything I’ve heard proposed—from Sharon, at any rate—would actually put a stop to them.

The most charitable interpretation I can put on Sharon’s policy—as regards his intelligence, anyway—is that he thinks that if he kills enough Palestinians, demolishes enough of the Palestinian infrastructure, and in general stomps on them as much as possible, the survivors will be sufficiently cowed that they’ll no longer support attacks on Israel, for fear of retaliation.

It wouldn’t work on Israelis; I don’t know why anyone would expect it to work on Palestinians.

Another interpretation is that Sharon shares what I think is the quintessential right-wing viewpoint: that there are good people and evil people, and if we kill or lock up all the evil people, there will be no more evil. Personally, I don’t think Sharon’s that stupid, though I wouldn’t say so of a lot of US policymakers—we can see that kind of thinking over here everywhere from the War on Terrorism (or “on Evil”, depending on the speechwriter and the audience) to the War on Drugs.

But the limited version of that second interpretation is what Sharon’s been trying to sell: All we want is Arafat and the “terrorist infrastructure” (by which I hope they mean something different from the Palestinian economic infrastructure) out of the picture, and we’ll go home. (At least I think that’s what Sharon’s claiming his victory conditions are. It’s kind of hard to tell, just as it’s kind of hard to tell when GW thinks we’ll have won the War on Evil.)

I guess where I have trouble with this one is that I don’t think it’ll work. I don’t think there’s a limited supply of terrorists in the occupied territories. I don’t think that Arafat could stop the bombings any time he wanted to, the way Sharon claims he can. Whereas Sharon could stop the Israeli army with a phone call. And that’s why I, at least, have a tendency to strain at Israeli gnats while swallowing Palestinian camels.

One quibble: It’s entirely possible that if Sharon had, at certain points, “stopped the Israeli army with a phone call,” we’d be back to talking about Prime Minister Netanyahu even now. And we very well may yet.

I also suspect it’s a mistake to see the current round of Israeli actions as entirely driven by the ambitions of the military, as if Israel were some banana republic being driven hither and yon by men on horseback.

Meanwhile, on the subject of growing European anti-semitism, Iain J. Coleman takes my call to “please talk me out of this” seriously:

Basically, Nick Denton is right. What used to be a widely-distributed anti-Semitic culture is now the preserve of a few sad wankers with shaven heads and shaven brains. The widespread lack of sympathy for Israel does not arise from anti-Semitism: rather, it comes out of a post-imperialist political discourse, in which colonialism is routinely condemned. True, this discourse has solidified in a section of the left, to the point where the power identified as colonial or imperialist is automatically in the wrong: this knee-jerk reaction leads to the assumption that any US foreign action is wicked, just as it leads to the assumption that any Israeli action is colonial oppression. It’s a lazy and wrong-headed point of view, but not anti-Semitic. Hell, the same people condemned British “imperialism” in Northern Ireland, and supported the “armed struggle” of the IRA.

As for actual, serious anti-Semitism in Europe, of the attacks on Jewish people and places of worship variety, that’s been imported from the Arab world, transmitted along the immigration routes. Its existence does point to a failure in Europe generally, and perhaps in France most of all, to make the positive political case for immigration, and to enable immigrants to become full participants in the national culture. This has had all sorts of bad consequences, not least in creating opportunities for the far right to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment. However, it has also led multiculturally-minded people to err on the side of tolerating the intolerant, of being reluctant to make a big deal out of Arab anti-Semitism because it might seem like attacking a minority.

If it’s not already clear, I think both these attitudes on the Left are wrong. The world is a damn sight more complex than evil imperialists versus oppressed heroes: the US action in Afghanistan between Sept 11 and the fall of the Taliban was justified, effective and praiseworthy, and for all Sharon’s short-sighted brutality we must support Israel against those people who want to destroy it and to exterminate its people. We have to do a better job of dealing honestly with immigration, making the most of its economic and cultural benefits, and should not shy away from attacking neo-nazis of whatever colour or ancestry.

However, it is wrong to conflate Leftist anti-colonialism with Arab anti-Semitism. Wrong, not just because it is factually inaccurate, but because it fatally weakens the pro-Israeli case by making Israel’s supporters seem shrill and paranoid, and because if we fail to connect with the real arguments of the anti-Israelis we lose any chance of persuading them to change their minds.

There’s a lot to that, but one person’s “shrill and paranoid”, needless to say, is another’s “upset and anxious.” Ron Rosenbaum, in his latest New York Observer column, has a lot to say about this sort of thing. When large numbers of people are spouting exterminationist rhetoric, paying attention—even getting alarmed—is not “turning to hatred,” as Amy Wilentz’s odious New York magazine piece had it, nor is it being “paranoid.” When large numbers of people are talking about their desire to brutalize, exile, and kill you and yours, and significant numbers have started to actually do it, it isn’t “paranoid” to be afraid, or “shrill” to loudly express alarm. Particularly when the last time your relatives ignored this sort of talk, just a couple of generations ago, they mostly wound up dead.

I also think that Iain, despite plentiful good will, is oversimplifying when he says true European antisemitism is mostly “the preserve of a few sad wankers with shaven heads and shaven brains.” It’s not just a few skinheads or leftover brownshirts. I’ve heard it in the casual comments of nice liberal-minded Oxbridge-educated London publishing colleagues, which is why I found the now-famous story of the ambassador at the dinner party entirely believable. And of course it’s deeply rooted in the right wing of the Church, as Catholic writers like Garry Wills and James Carroll have tirelessly shown. While we’re calling for perspective, let’s look at the historical perspective: educated Europeans were happily killing Jews by the hundredweight a lot more recently than us dumb American cowboys were killing Indians and enslaving blacks.

Certainly, when we fret about European antisemitism, we’re “conflating” alarming trends among disparate subgrounds. Then again, many of Europe’s previous outbreaks of serious Jew-bashing happened because suddenly two or more disparate subgroups suddenly realized there was advantage to be gained from jointly sponsoring a pogrom or two. Sometimes, as in Limerick in 1904, beating the crap out of the local Jews was a community-building exercise, serving to bring together previously-feuding groups, like churchmen and merchants. Is it so hard, then, to imagine these groups, for all their differences—skinhead yobs, bored Muslim kids, dingbat lefty “anti-colonialists”—managing to get together and doing a little “conflating” on their own? It is not hard to imagine. Europeans have been coming up with new reasons to kill Jews for over a thousand years. It’s a nice thing that doing so has been socially unacceptable for a few decades, but I don’t think Israeli and American Jews and their friends are out of line, or “shrill and paranoid,” for worrying. [06:28 PM]